Bringing out minority youths' Hidden Genius

Matthew Wardenaar of Tagged (right) gives Mohammed Abdulla a hand with Google Glass during a session of the Hidden Genius Project, formed by technology professionals, nonprofits and educators to give underrepresented minorities guidance in moving toward STEM education and the tech sector. less

Matthew Wardenaar of Tagged (right) gives Mohammed Abdulla a hand with Google Glass during a session of the Hidden Genius Project, formed by technology professionals, nonprofits and educators to give ... more

A student takes notes as Tagged employees talk about their work while Tagged hosts the Hidden Genius Group in their office in San Francisco, Calif. on July 26, 2013.

A student takes notes as Tagged employees talk about their work while Tagged hosts the Hidden Genius Group in their office in San Francisco, Calif. on July 26, 2013.

Photo: Ian C. Bates, The Chronicle

Bringing out minority youths' Hidden Genius

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On Friday morning, a group of black teenage boys sat around a conference-room table in North Beach, MacBook Airs open, as they debated the best way to code the Fibonacci Sequence.

It's a classic problem of computer science, figuring out an algorithm that spits out a series of numbers generated by adding up the two preceding ones: 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21 and so on.

The lesson wasn't simply designed to teach the high school students the Python programming language they were working in. It was calibrated to get them to think logically, so that they can eventually work in any language.

Their mentor, developer and entrepreneur Kurt Collins, guided the discussion with a delicate blend of sarcasm, wit and tough love. At one point he made Johnnel White, going into his sophomore year at Vallejo High School, erase the formula he'd carefully transcribed from his laptop onto the whiteboard.

"If you understand the logic, you don't have to memorize it," he said.

The students are members of the Hidden Genius Project, an initiative formed last year by nine technology professionals, nonprofit executives and teachers who wanted to steer more minorities into the growing and often lucrative industry.

"We're hoping they end up becoming future leaders in this space, creating jobs and opening up more opportunities for other black males to continue down this road," said Kilimanjaro Robbs, another mentor and co-founder of the organization.

A 2011 study by the Department of Commerce found that blacks and Latinos together accounted for only 12 percent of all science, technology, engineering and math workers, despite representing a quarter of the U.S. workforce. Moreover, those STEM workers out-earned their counterparts in other industries by 39 percent and 36 percent, respectively, on average.

In fact, blacks and Latinos on the whole are not benefiting from the strong economic growth in Silicon Valley, according to a report this year from Joint Venture Silicon Valley and Silicon Valley Communication Foundation. While per capita incomes in Santa Clara and San Mateo counties rose 4 percent for whites and 1 percent for Asians from 2009 to 2011, they plunged 18 percent for blacks and 5 percent for Latinos.

Louis Willacy, senior vice president of corporate development at Tagged, the social networking company that hosted the students on Friday, gave the young men another statistic in the first presentation of the day: While the overall Bay Area unemployment rate is around 8 percent, it's below 2 percent for engineers.

"You can literally decide you don't like the food a place serves, say you're done and have a new job the next day," said Willacy, who is African American himself.

The founders of the Hidden Genius Project have created what they hope will be a scalable model that similar groups can adopt around the nation, including ones focused on women, Latinos and other underrepresented groups in the technology field.

Five students joined the two-year program in 2012 and nine more signed up this year. They attend high schools in Alameda, Berkeley, Oakland, Vallejo and elsewhere in the Bay Area. The group generally goes after average students who need a little extra guidance, as opposed to those already succeeding at the top levels, Robbs said. But to get in, the students must display a high level of commitment and drive during a thorough screening process.

The program includes an eight-week summer program each year, during which the students work on developing an app that solves a problem for people 13 to 18 years old. One team is working on a locational app that helps users on the run quickly find a nearby restaurant that meets their dietary restrictions, such as a gluten-free diet.

The students do hands-on work with mentors like Robbs and Collins on hard programming skills, as well as soft skills like achieving goals and improving their ability to communicate.

Once the school year begins, they continue to meet with mentors for five to eight hours each week to reinforce and build upon the lessons of the summer.

The group also gets to see up close how technology companies work, and interact with professionals working in the field, through a series of visits to startups and other businesses.

That's what brought the group on Friday to Tagged, the 9-year-old company whose namesake app is designed to help users meet new people. The students have also recently visited Northrop Grumman and Pandora.

Tagged was co-founded by Greg Tseng, who is Asian-American, and Johann Schleier-Smith, who is German and African-American. The company makes a point of regularly hosting minority groups, including NewME, Black Girls Code and Girls in Tech.

Tseng said that as young entrepreneurs, they were warmly embraced by Silicon Valley and want to pay it forward.

"Part of what's so great about Silicon Valley, what makes it so special, is this ecosystem keeps on giving back to itself," Tseng said. "I feel a big responsibility and big opportunity to give back as well."

During the field trip on Friday, the students weren't shy about asking Tseng and other Tagged executives exactly what they wanted to know.

"What's your salary?" posed Isaiah Zulu, a 15-year-old who attends Berkeley High, in what proved a popular question.

"It's higher than yours," Tseng replied tactfully, adding after a beat: "Well, I don't want to make assumptions."

Isaiah Martin, 13, a student at Head-Royce School in Oakland, had a similarly direct question for Matt Wardenaar, principal product manager at Tagged.

"Ten years from now, if you're still here, will you hook us up with a job?" he said.

But some of the students are aiming higher than working for someone else. Zebreon Wallace, a first-year member of the program going into his sophomore year at the Oakland Military Institute, is working on a tutoring app that provides flash cards for students in specific subjects like history and calculus. But his ultimate plans are more ambitious.